I’m exaggerating, but only a little.
Reverb fees are too high and make it so you can’t sell anything at a good fair price. Plus they now send your income over 600 USD in for taxes. So between those 2 things I would rather sell on here or locally on CL. Plus I have sold so much on there before and it’s always nerve wracking that some buyer may scam you and say they did not receive the package.
Reverb raising their rates is why everyone complains they can’t find any deals on there anymore and everything is overpriced.
But if its possible then it usually will be done.
That is exactly what I’m doing. I’m confused as to why you’d think these two things are mutually exclusive. If you have car insurance, experience an accident, and the company pays you, that doesn’t mean that your rates weren’t too high, relative to other companies. If your insurance is $900 per month on a $45,000.00 car, it’s reasonable to assert that your insurance company is charging too much (assuming you’re a normal customer without 3 DUI’s, etc.) So, in answer to your question - yes. The two are not mutually exclusive.
My thesis was that:
1.) Reverb, being (more or less) the only game in town, is using their near-monopoly to gouge a bit on their commission.
2.) There are, potentially, benefits to having some sort of intermediary (such as Reverb) when dealing with certain less-than-honest individuals.
3.) It’s everyone’s personal choice as to whether what Reverb offers represents the best value proposition for them in a given scenario.
Finally, there’s this: I don’t know that, as you stated, “they” (i.e., Reverb) were the ones who paid me. There’s a substantial chance of that, but they very well may have decided that the buyer was obligated to pay, and just continued to disburse the payment he had submitted which they were already holding. So, I don’t know if “they” were the ones who bore the burden of payment - or if they simply said “nice try” to the buyer and sent his payment to me. Reverb doesn’t disclose things like this. What I can say is that they made sure I was paid after I had submitted evidence which
Is not suggested or required by Reverb (in other words, I only had these photos because I’m a bit OCD with regard to making sure that anything I ship is ridiculously well protected, and I take photos in order to reassure (and impress) the buyer with my service, as I am very protective of my 5 star rating. The vast majority of Reverb sellers would not have taken photos of themselves packing an item, revealing the redundant protective layers and inner “box within a box” around the item - and would therefore likely NOT have been in a position to prove how unlikely this damage was. (Which would then have very likely caused the scenario to end in a much less favorable way for them.) I more or less had everyone “dead to rights” on this, so it worked out OK. I wouldn’t exactly deify Reverb for deciding to take my word for it, given the preponderance of evidence I presented them. For what it’s worth, given my experience, it seems to be a good idea to have photographic proof that you have adequately (or, in my case, MORE than adequately) packed an item you are selling in case something like this occurs.
We moved from Maui back to the mainland and the shipping for a moving container was going to be $10-15k. Just to get the Reverb shipping discount I made a bunch of auctions from another account and bought them from myself for like $2 each. My account showed an outstanding balance of $3,500 in shipping fees, which is not normal, usually it’s zero.
So when the new month rolled around they saw this and flagged my account. I paid the bill of course. They took away preferred seller status and explained that it was against policy etc. i was apologetic and explained the situation. I just reapplied for preferred seller a month or so later and everything is back to normal. Was it worth saving thousands of dollars? Ohya for sure. I was prepared to sacrifice my account cause there was no other way.
But all this to say if you just call or email them and explain that you didn’t know etc I’m sure they’d be understanding.
Here’s the letter and the pic I sent them back for giggles
They are not labelled as private messages.
Yeah. The messaging function is connected to the transaction, and admins having access to it provides a layer of security if things go wrong. Which is the whole point of having a middle man like Reverb in the first place.
What if someone else had bought your shit tho?
Yes, the point of keeping messages on Reverb is in case anything shady occurs with either side there’s a transaction history.
I have tried to go off-Reverb for transactions, but at my own (educated, risk-averse) peril.
I also talk in code that’s less likely to be picked up by the obvious text parsing algorithms after getting a warning once
I do support a modicum of analysis of interactions and OCR of images to prevent fraudsters from succeeding as easily, a lot of vectors involve getting people to move off-site before they rip them off.
Lollll, if you ever have a need for a corporate shipping account, check out https://ship.pirateship.com/ship
I made another account and ordered two things through it. Selling will be much harder since I have basically no feedback whereas I had 320+ perfect feedback on the other.
So bizarre to me, 99% of my buying/selling was done on site, 1% off site. Now it’s 0% for them. What’s the point? What have they gained?
Trying to stay positive day by day.
craigslist for life
Seriously, I kinda like meeting the same people sometimes and occasionally around town when selling
Fees galore are intact.
What? They have a very well working site, they offer extremely good buyer protection and work globally. Before reverb buying gear abroad from the internet was a crapshoot, ebay was the only place really and due to them not being really concentrated on gear you often didn’t get exactly what was advertised.
Reverb is like a high end boutique shop. Premium gear for premium prices, you can find pretty much anything immediately but you have to pay a little extra for the convenience.
Yes good point. Saves you time looking for exclusive items.
Saves you a huge amount of time and they offer buyer protection. You should honestly get kicked out if you use their site for selling and then do the deal off-site.
Kind of like those fashion stores in Beverley Hills.
“How does it look”
It looks great sir, it really suits you"
Jeeves pay the man